Defining Advertising Success In The Digital World

Defining success in advertising used to be relatively simple: An ad was constructed as cost-effectively as possible and then deployed in the right channel. From here, customer conversion and product sale rates could be measured, and the business owner would understand whether the initiative had been successful or not.

Now things are a little different. For starters, technology has changed, giving advertisers a viable means to deploy their advertisements wherever they are required and then providing them with a diverse range of tools with which to measure success.

Second, the environment has shifted. There were once only one or two channels used to connect with customers. Now these numbers have multiplied and advertisers are expected to be able to meet leads and prospects wherever they are found.

Finally, potential objectives are now pluralized. Digital marketing is no longer a flat-out sprint to the finish line, but rather a nuanced journey through divergent alleyways, with choices to be made at several key points. One marketer’s target for success may not necessarily be shared by another. The same marketer may even change his or her objectives between advertising campaigns.

New parameters, new definitions of success

There are a variety of ways to define modern advertising success. Following are just a few of the most common examples.

Direct sale increases

Perhaps this is a little old-fashioned, but a good way to measure the success of an ad is its effect on driving sales directly. This is relatively easy to measure and can be analyzed via direct clicks or simply the upturn in conversions after the advertisement is deployed.

Cost per acquisition reduction

Increasing sales is not the only way to increase revenue. Improving efficiency and reducing the cost of acquiring a new customer makes a business more streamlined, lowers costs, and is an effective way to build revenue over time.

Web site bounce rate

Bounce is when customers access your website and immediately leave. A high bounce rate can be caused by inaccurate content, poor site navigation, or substandard advertising, and it can have a marked effect on SEO performance.

Page views online

Similar to the bounce rate, the number of page views per visit gives you an indication of how users are engaging with your site. By developing a viable landing page to accompany your advertisement, you can determine the page views you receive per each visit.

Time spent on website

Like the metrics mentioned above, the amount of time a user spends on your website is important in gauging the effectiveness of your advertising strategies and website structure. A successful advertisement could dramatically raise the average amount of time spent on your site, boosting the page’s SEO credentials as well as its lead conversion performance.

Click-through rate

Click-through fates (CTRs) represent how many clicks and website visits derive directly from an ad. This metric is ideal for understanding precisely which advertisements are eliciting interest online and which digital marketing efforts need to be tweaked.

Cost per advert click

For paid advertisements, return on investment needs to be optimized in order to make the media strategy cost-effective. Analyzing precisely how much each click on an advertisement costs the business is a good tool to help define success.

Direct traffic increase

Most digital marketing strategies require high levels of online traffic to be successful. This makes direct traffic increase a powerful metric to assess the success of a particular initiative.

Diversified traffic sources

The most successful web strategies are diverse ones, with visitors accessing the business’s online presence from a range of different platforms. Positioning ads within these platforms and using analytics to assess the performance of these ads can help you gain a clearer picture of where the traffic is coming from.

Analytics and unified data

Analytics provides the lens through which success can be measured. Ensure that powerful analytics software is deployed within each element of your business’s digital marketing strategy so it can provide direct insight into how well each advertisement is working.

Be ruthless with the data received from analytics. If one particular advertisement is not performing as it should, or is not pulling its weight in one or more of your targeted metrics, it needs to be dropped and then tweaked for redeployment.

The value of this data does not end here. As with all data derived from a business, it cannot be used and discarded. Instead, it must be unified, stored, reported on, and reapplied wherever appropriate as media service providers and broadcasters look not only to define the success of their advertisement strategies but to optimize their business models as a whole.

No area of a media business can operate in isolation. Each process must be unified and brought into line, and collecting and utilizing data is a major part of this.

Beyond instant revenue: Long- vs. short-term objectives

There are many different paths to success, and these objectives must be clearly outlined and planned before your advertisement is crafted and deployed—but aren’t these paths ultimately all heading toward the same end?

In a way, they are. However, this is a simplified view. The ultimate aim of any business is to grow and to make money in the long run, but there are other goals as well. In the short term, focusing on SEO and developing traffic is more beneficial to an organization than merely bringing a product to market with no support. SEO might not provide you with any instant profit gains, but it does help you to build a stable platform from which to pursue this goal.

Keep this in mind when assessing success in advertising. Each initiative must be balanced to achieve stability, and each must do its part to contribute to long-term success. If this means eschewing short-term profit booms in favor of slowly augmenting traffic or building authority in the market, so be it.

This is what it means to work in digital marketing today. Start defining your personal long-term and short-term goals, and position your business for success.

How To Build Better Customer Loyalty With Authenticity

Successful customer loyalty programs can seem like an impossible dream for a retailer, but their potential for repeat business makes them well worth pursuing — if done properly.

Store credit cards, for example, might appear to be a good place to start, as 40 percent of shoppers who have one indicate that they’re more likely to return.

“That has more retailers working to get customers to sign up for their own branded store credit cards … to encourage purchases, grow ticket sizes, and breed loyalty,” Retail Dive stated last week. “The good news for retailers is that they seem to be making progress.”

But that progress could turn out to be unacceptably slow because defining — and earning — customer loyalty isn’t so simple, according to a panel of retail experts at NRF 2018. A loyal customer isn’t necessarily someone who regularly buys from you, and what drives loyalty for other retailers probably won’t work for you.

Rethinking who’s loyal

“You need to look inwardly about what is the definition of a loyal customer — not to your peers in the industry,” John Allen, chief technology officer of UK-based fast-fashion retailer Missguided told the panel. “What happens in grocery is completely different for fashion, merchandise, sportswear, etc.”

Frequent buying doesn’t necessarily make a customer loyal; nor do frequent returns make another customer disloyal, according to Allen. And many loyalty programs have focused on only one segment of the retailer’s catalog, to the detriment of their wider range of products — and ignoring loyal customers who didn’t shop that segment.

“All of these things need to be taken into account when you look at loyalty … [and] that sort of analysis — and continued analysis — needs to be in place,” Allen said. “It’s not about the product anymore — it’s about the brand; I think that brand advocates in the world of social media can have a very much greater contribution — and be more loyal — than those who are buying lots of products.”

Making it easy, experiential, and beneficial

“There’s definitely a correlation between brands that have loyalty programs and brands that do a better job understanding their customer and deploying that information,” Evan Neufeld, Intelligence VP at New York-based business intelligence firm L2 Inc., told the panel. “Digital has opened up our expectations … it’s about experiential rewards: It’s being given exclusive offers; it’s being told something’s happening in-store; it’s getting some sort of loyalty points for actually sharing your information socially with your friends.”

Brands have historically created loyalty programs to help themselves, often at the expense of the customer; going forward, they must align their benefits with benefits to the customer, according to Neufeld. They must also make clear the distinct value of membership — so that new customers will join as easily and efficiently as possible.

“It’s the small things that people are missing that make life easier,” Neufeld said, citing brands that bury their loyalty program registration in the nether regions of their websites. “If you have one, make sure that you’re making it available so consumers can actually reach it.”

Where customer loyalty begins

“Loyalty starts by having a definition of who your customer is — and really focusing on your customer,” Neufeld said. “That’s why mass brands have a huge challenge.”

Those retail giants are often trying to sell everything to everybody, where smaller retailers tend to focus on narrow demographics, according to Neufeld. It’s tempting for big brands to try attracting customers with sales — but that paints consumers with too broad a brush, which won’t hold their attention.

“We see completely different buying behavior, even from the same pool of people,” Missguided’s Allen said. “If you’re selling a range of products, as most of us do … then your loyalty program is not going to work across all of those — even if you’ve worked out who your customer is.”

The human element

“The number-one way that people navigate things to do is by friends and family,” L2’s Neufeld said. “[It’s] by recommendation and social media.”

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About Derek Klobucher

Derek Klobucher is a Financial Services Writer and Editor for Sybase, an SAP Company. He has covered the exchanges in Chicago, European regulation in Dublin and banking legislation in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Northwestern University in Evanston.

Add in today’s consumer preference for out-of-home dining, and grocers and other food retailers have lost 29% of their total market share since 1991.

Only 35% of food spending takes place in a food store today, according to a recent survey from IDC.

How grocery retailers can adapt

A plethora of digitally native competitors have cropped up in recent years, such as Blue Apron, Boxed, and Instabuggy, but none have had the impact of Amazon, which has been steadily building momentum in grocery with AmazonPantry, AmazonFresh, AmazonGo, AmazonFresh Pickup, and of course, its Whole Food acquisition. Recently Amazon announced the first major integration between its e-commerce operations and Whole Foods. Groceries from the chain has been added to Amazon’s Prime Now service in four markets, with plans to expand.

What can grocery retailers learn from Amazon’s approach to grocery?

Be willing to experiment with different business models

Don’t rush to market but rather take a measured test and learn approach

Use acquisitions to acquire expertise not available in-house

Grocery retailers in Canada are well-positioned to survive and thrive

Longo Brothers acquired and has been successfully operating the Grocery Gateway delivery service since 2004. Most recently, they’ve tripled the size of their facilities, upgraded their infrastructure, and re-launched their website to make it even easier to use and more convenient. This helped them reach double-digit percentage growth in the first six months after re-launch.

Loblaws launched a grocery click-and-collect service in a few of their namesake Toronto stores in 2014. Since then they have methodically rolled out the service across different banners, store formats, and geographies. Recently Loblaws reported they reached 300 click-and-collect locations at the end of 2017 and is adding approximately one store per day to the total. While firmly believing the click-and-collect model provides the most value to their customers, they have formed a strategic partnership with Instacart to offer a delivery alternative.

Metro launched in-store collection and delivery services in three stores in Montreal and Laval in late 2016. A year later their services cover the vast majority of Quebec with plans for Ontario. Capitalizing on the meal kit trend, Metro recently became majority owner of Miss Fresh, a Montreal startup.

What now?

There are success stories of grocery retailers preparing for and staying ahead of the disruption in their industry. But there are also lessons to be learned from other retailers’ false starts. Here are a few examples:

Taking the fast and easy route of partnering with a third-party provider for your online delivery business only to have them acquired by one of your biggest competitors.

Over-investing in an elaborate warehouse and distribution system for your initial foray into selling groceries online rather than leveraging your existing store assets to build scale.

Deciding to build a supply chain system from scratch that results in empty shelves and unhappy employees rather than choosing a best-in-class, time-tested solution.

To succeed in the face of industry disruption, you need to:

Have leadership vision and commitment

Look outside your industry to fill resource and experience gaps

Explore what the world has to offer in terms of business models and solutions

Be open to coopetition partnerships and acquisitions

Select a technology partner that has: (1) The industry expertise, resources, and tools to help you create your vision and build your strategic plan and roadmap; (2) Market-leading “innovation to execution” pre-integrated modular solutions; (3) Long-term financial stability to invest in new technologies such as IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, conversational commerce, blockchain, and more; (4) Global experience with local presence and expertise

Want to learn more about engaging the modern grocery shopper? Click here!

The Blockchain Solution

In 2013, several UK supermarket chains discovered that products they were selling as beef were actually made at least partly—and in some cases, entirely—from horsemeat. The resulting uproar led to a series of product recalls, prompted stricter food testing, and spurred the European food industry to take a closer look at how unlabeled or mislabeled ingredients were finding their way into the food chain.

By 2020, a scandal like this will be eminently preventable.

The separation between bovine and equine will become immutable with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, which will track the provenance and identity of every animal from stall to store, adding the data to a blockchain that anyone can check but no one can alter.

Food processing companies will be able to use that blockchain to confirm and label the contents of their products accordingly—down to the specific farms and animals represented in every individual package. That level of detail may be too much information for shoppers, but they will at least be able to trust that their meatballs come from the appropriate species.

The Spine of Digitalization

Keeping food safer and more traceable is just the beginning, however. Improvements in the supply chain, which have been incremental for decades despite billions of dollars of technology investments, are about to go exponential. Emerging technologies are converging to transform the supply chain from tactical to strategic, from an easily replicable commodity to a new source of competitive differentiation.

You may already be thinking about how to take advantage of blockchain technology, which makes data and transactions immutable, transparent, and verifiable (see “What Is Blockchain and How Does It Work?”). That will be a powerful tool to boost supply chain speed and efficiency—always a worthy goal, but hardly a disruptive one.

However, if you think of blockchain as the spine of digitalization and technologies such as AI, the IoT, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, and drones as the limbs, you have a powerful supply chain body that can leapfrog ahead of its competition.

Blockchain is essentially a sequential, distributed ledger of transactions that is constantly updated on a global network of computers. The ownership and history of a transaction is embedded in the blockchain at the transaction’s earliest stages and verified at every subsequent stage.

A blockchain network uses vast amounts of computing power to encrypt the ledger as it’s being written. This makes it possible for every computer in the network to verify the transactions safely and transparently. The more organizations that participate in the ledger, the more complex and secure the encryption becomes, making it increasingly tamperproof.

Why does blockchain matter for the supply chain?

It enables the safe exchange of value without a central verifying partner, which makes transactions faster and less expensive.

It dramatically simplifies recordkeeping by establishing a single, authoritative view of the truth across all parties.

It builds a secure, immutable history and chain of custody as different parties handle the items being shipped, and it updates the relevant documentation.

By doing these things, blockchain allows companies to create smart contracts based on programmable business logic, which can execute themselves autonomously and thereby save time and money by reducing friction and intermediaries.

Hints of the Future

In the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, we had no idea that the internet would become so large and pervasive, nor that we’d find a way to carry it all in our pockets on small slabs of glass.

But we could tell that it had vast potential.

Today, with the combination of emerging technologies that promise to turbocharge digital transformation, we’re just beginning to see how we might turn the supply chain into a source of competitive advantage (see “What’s the Magic Combination?”).

What’s the Magic Combination?

Those who focus on blockchain in isolation will miss out on a much bigger supply chain opportunity.

Many experts believe emerging technologies will work with blockchain to digitalize the supply chain and create new business models:

Blockchain will provide the foundation of automated trust for all parties in the supply chain.

The IoT will link objects—from tiny devices to large machines—and generate data about status, locations, and transactions that will be recorded on the blockchain.

3D printing will extend the supply chain to the customer’s doorstep with hyperlocal manufacturing of parts and products with IoT sensors built into the items and/or their packaging. Every manufactured object will be smart, connected, and able to communicate so that it can be tracked and traced as needed.

Big Data management tools will process all the information streaming in around the clock from IoT sensors.

AI and machine learning will analyze this enormous amount of data to reveal patterns and enable true predictability in every area of the supply chain.

Combining these technologies with powerful analytics tools to predict trends will make lack of visibility into the supply chain a thing of the past. Organizations will be able to examine a single machine across its entire lifecycle and identify areas where they can improve performance and increase return on investment. They’ll be able to follow and monitor every component of a product, from design through delivery and service. They’ll be able to trigger and track automated actions between and among partners and customers to provide customized transactions in real time based on real data.

After decades of talk about markets of one, companies will finally have the power to create them—at scale and profitably.

Amazon, for example, is becoming as much a logistics company as a retailer. Its ordering and delivery systems are so streamlined that its customers can launch and complete a same-day transaction with a push of a single IP-enabled button or a word to its ever-attentive AI device, Alexa. And this level of experimentation and innovation is bubbling up across industries.

Consider manufacturing, where the IoT is transforming automation inside already highly automated factories. Machine-to-machine communication is enabling robots to set up, provision, and unload equipment quickly and accurately with minimal human intervention. Meanwhile, sensors across the factory floor are already capable of gathering such information as how often each machine needs maintenance or how much raw material to order given current production trends.

Once they harvest enough data, businesses will be able to feed it through machine learning algorithms to identify trends that forecast future outcomes. At that point, the supply chain will start to become both automated and predictive. We’ll begin to see business models that include proactively scheduling maintenance, replacing parts just before they’re likely to break, and automatically ordering materials and initiating customer shipments.

Italian train operator Trenitalia, for example, has put IoT sensors on its locomotives and passenger cars and is using analytics and in-memory computing to gauge the health of its trains in real time, according to an article in Computer Weekly. “It is now possible to affordably collect huge amounts of data from hundreds of sensors in a single train, analyse that data in real time and detect problems before they actually happen,” Trenitalia’s CIO Danilo Gismondi told Computer Weekly.

Blockchain allows all the critical steps of the supply chain to go electronic and become irrefutably verifiable by all the critical parties within minutes: the seller and buyer, banks, logistics carriers, and import and export officials.

The project, which is scheduled to be completed in 2018, will change Trenitalia’s business model, allowing it to schedule more trips and make each one more profitable. The railway company will be able to better plan parts inventories and determine which lines are consistently performing poorly and need upgrades. The new system will save €100 million a year, according to ARC Advisory Group.

New business models continue to evolve as 3D printers become more sophisticated and affordable, making it possible to move the end of the supply chain closer to the customer. Companies can design parts and products in materials ranging from carbon fiber to chocolate and then print those items in their warehouse, at a conveniently located third-party vendor, or even on the client’s premises.

In addition to minimizing their shipping expenses and reducing fulfillment time, companies will be able to offer more personalized or customized items affordably in small quantities. For example, clothing retailer Ministry of Supply recently installed a 3D printer at its Boston store that enables it to make an article of clothing to a customer’s specifications in under 90 minutes, according to an article in Forbes.

This kind of highly distributed manufacturing has potential across many industries. It could even create a market for secure manufacturing for highly regulated sectors, allowing a manufacturer to transmit encrypted templates to printers in tightly protected locations, for example.

Meanwhile, organizations are investigating ways of using blockchain technology to authenticate, track and trace, automate, and otherwise manage transactions and interactions, both internally and within their vendor and customer networks. The ability to collect data, record it on the blockchain for immediate verification, and make that trustworthy data available for any application delivers indisputable value in any business context. The supply chain will be no exception.

Blockchain Is the Change Driver

The supply chain is configured as we know it today because it’s impossible to create a contract that accounts for every possible contingency. Consider cross-border financial transfers, which are so complex and must meet so many regulations that they require a tremendous number of intermediaries to plug the gaps: lawyers, accountants, customer service reps, warehouse operators, bankers, and more. By reducing that complexity, blockchain technology makes intermediaries less necessary—a transformation that is revolutionary even when measured only in cost savings.

“If you’re selling 100 items a minute, 24 hours a day, reducing the cost of the supply chain by just $1 per item saves you more than $52.5 million a year,” notes Dirk Lonser, SAP go-to-market leader at DXC Technology, an IT services company. “By replacing manual processes and multiple peer-to-peer connections through fax or e-mail with a single medium where everyone can exchange verified information instantaneously, blockchain will boost profit margins exponentially without raising prices or even increasing individual productivity.”

“Blockchain will let enterprises more accurately trace faulty parts or products from end users back to factories for recalls,” Khan says. “It will streamline supplier onboarding, contracting, and management by creating an integrated platform that the company’s entire network can access in real time. It will give vendors secure, transparent visibility into inventory 24×7. And at a time when counterfeiting is a real concern in multiple industries, it will make it easy for both retailers and customers to check product authenticity.”

Blockchain allows all the critical steps of the supply chain to go electronic and become irrefutably verifiable by all the critical parties within minutes: the seller and buyer, banks, logistics carriers, and import and export officials. Although the key parts of the process remain the same as in today’s analog supply chain, performing them electronically with blockchain technology shortens each stage from hours or days to seconds while eliminating reams of wasteful paperwork. With goods moving that quickly, companies have ample room for designing new business models around manufacturing, service, and delivery.

Challenges on the Path to Adoption

For all this to work, however, the data on the blockchain must be correct from the beginning. The pills, produce, or parts on the delivery truck need to be the same as the items listed on the manifest at the loading dock. Every use case assumes that the data is accurate—and that will only happen when everything that’s manufactured is smart, connected, and able to self-verify automatically with the help of machine learning tuned to detect errors and potential fraud.

Companies are already seeing the possibilities of applying this bundle of emerging technologies to the supply chain. IDC projects that by 2021, at least 25% of Forbes Global 2000 (G2000) companies will use blockchain services as a foundation for digital trust at scale; 30% of top global manufacturers and retailers will do so by 2020. IDC also predicts that by 2020, up to 10% of pilot and production blockchain-distributed ledgers will incorporate data from IoT sensors.

Despite IDC’s optimism, though, the biggest barrier to adoption is the early stage level of enterprise use cases, particularly around blockchain. Currently, the sole significant enterprise blockchain production system is the virtual currency Bitcoin, which has unfortunately been tainted by its associations with speculation, dubious financial transactions, and the so-called dark web.

The technology is still in a sufficiently early stage that there’s significant uncertainty about its ability to handle the massive amounts of data a global enterprise supply chain generates daily. Never mind that it’s completely unregulated, with no global standard. There’s also a critical global shortage of experts who can explain emerging technologies like blockchain, the IoT, and machine learning to nontechnology industries and educate organizations in how the technologies can improve their supply chain processes. Finally, there is concern about how blockchain’s complex algorithms gobble computing power—and electricity (see “Blockchain Blackouts”).

Blockchain Blackouts

Blockchain is a power glutton. Can technology mediate the issue?

A major concern today is the enormous carbon footprint of the networks creating and solving the algorithmic problems that keep blockchains secure. Although virtual currency enthusiasts claim the problem is overstated, Michael Reed, head of blockchain technology for Intel, has been widely quoted as saying that the energy demands of blockchains are a significant drain on the world’s electricity resources.

Indeed, Wired magazine has estimated that by July 2019, the Bitcoin network alone will require more energy than the entire United States currently uses and that by February 2020 it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.

Still, computing power is becoming more energy efficient by the day and sticking with paperwork will become too slow, so experts—Intel’s Reed among them—consider this a solvable problem.

“We don’t know yet what the market will adopt. In a decade, it might be status quo or best practice, or it could be the next Betamax, a great technology for which there was no demand,” Lonser says. “Even highly regulated industries that need greater transparency in the entire supply chain are moving fairly slowly.”

Blockchain will require acceptance by a critical mass of companies, governments, and other organizations before it displaces paper documentation. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue: multiple companies need to adopt these technologies at the same time so they can build a blockchain to exchange information, yet getting multiple companies to do anything simultaneously is a challenge. Some early initiatives are already underway, though:

A London-based startup called Everledger is using blockchain and IoT technology to track the provenance, ownership, and lifecycles of valuable assets. The company began by tracking diamonds from mine to jewelry using roughly 200 different characteristics, with a goal of stopping both the demand for and the supply of “conflict diamonds”—diamonds mined in war zones and sold to finance insurgencies. It has since expanded to cover wine, artwork, and other high-value items to prevent fraud and verify authenticity.

In September 2017, SAP announced the creation of its SAP Leonardo Blockchain Co-Innovation program, a group of 27 enterprise customers interested in co-innovating around blockchain and creating business buy-in. The diverse group of participants includes management and technology services companies Capgemini and Deloitte, cosmetics company Natura Cosméticos S.A., and Moog Inc., a manufacturer of precision motion control systems.

Two of Europe’s largest shipping ports—Rotterdam and Antwerp—are working on blockchain projects to streamline interaction with port customers. The Antwerp terminal authority says eliminating paperwork could cut the costs of container transport by as much as 50%.

The Chinese online shopping behemoth Alibaba is experimenting with blockchain to verify the authenticity of food products and catch counterfeits before they endanger people’s health and lives.

Technology and transportation executives have teamed up to create the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA), a forum for developing blockchain standards and education for the freight industry.

It’s likely that the first blockchain-based enterprise supply chain use case will emerge in the next year among companies that see it as an opportunity to bolster their legal compliance and improve business processes. Once that happens, expect others to follow.

Customers Will Expect Change

It’s only a matter of time before the supply chain becomes a competitive driver. The question for today’s enterprises is how to prepare for the shift. Customers are going to expect constant, granular visibility into their transactions and faster, more customized service every step of the way. Organizations will need to be ready to meet those expectations.

If organizations have manual business processes that could never be automated before, now is the time to see if it’s possible. Organizations that have made initial investments in emerging technologies are looking at how their pilot projects are paying off and where they might extend to the supply chain. They are starting to think creatively about how to combine technologies to offer a product, service, or business model not possible before.

A manufacturer will load a self-driving truck with a 3D printer capable of creating a customer’s ordered item en route to delivering it. A vendor will capture the market for a socially responsible product by allowing its customers to track the product’s production and verify that none of its subcontractors use slave labor. And a supermarket chain will win over customers by persuading them that their choice of supermarket is also a choice between being certain of what’s in their food and simply hoping that what’s on the label matches what’s inside.

At that point, a smart supply chain won’t just be a competitive edge. It will become a competitive necessity. D!

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Why Blockchain Is Crucial For FP&A: Part 1

In these times of almost continuous technological change, there is a natural tendency to be suspect of whatever is being heralded as the “flavor of the month” or the “next best bet.” In early 2017, I was graciously given the opportunity to speak on what I believed to be the technologies that were transforming finance and specifically, the FP&A function. The talk I ended up giving covered five areas:

Advanced analytics and forecasting

Robotic process automation

Cloud and Software-as-a-Service

Artificial intelligence

Blockchain

While all these topics deserve further investigation, for this article, I want to focus on blockchain. Part of the reason for diving deeper into blockchain is the lack of understanding of what it actually is and the great amount of time people in the finance function are currently spending talking about it. This has greatly changed in the past nine months.

Last March, while hosting an FP&A Roundtable in Boston, I ask a group of 25 senior FP&A professionals how familiar they were with the concept of blockchain. Out of this august group, there was only one participant who felt truly comfortable with the concept. I still get asked on a regular basis, all over the world, “Blockchain. What is it?”

Blockchain: What is it?

By allowing digital information to be distributed but not copied, blockchain technology has created the spine of a new type of Internet. Picture a spreadsheet that is duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers. Now imagine that this network is designed to regularly update this spreadsheet, and you have a basic understanding of blockchain.

Information held on a blockchain exists as a shared and continually reconciled database. This is a way of using the network that has obvious benefits. The blockchain database isn’t stored in any single location, meaning the records it keeps are truly transparent and easily verifiable. No centralized version of this information exists for someone to corrupt. Hosted by many computers simultaneously, its data is accessible to any authorized user.

Blockchain technology is like the Internet in that it has a built-in robustness. By storing blocks of information that are identical across its network, the blockchain 1) cannot be controlled by any single entity and 2) has no single point of failure. The Internet itself has proven to be durable for almost 30 years. It’s a track record that bodes well for blockchain technology as it continues to be developed.

A self-auditing ecosystem

The blockchain network lives in a state of consensus, one that automatically checks in with itself on a regular basis. A kind of self-auditing ecosystem of a digital value, the network reconciles every transaction that happens at regular intervals. Each group of these transactions is referred to as a “block.” Two important properties result from this:

Transparency. Data is embedded within the network as a whole, and by definition, is available to all authorized users.

Incorruptibility. Altering any unit of information on the blockchain would mean using a huge amount of computing power to override the entire network. In theory, it is possible; however, in practice, it’s unlikely to happen.

A decentralized technology

By design, the blockchain is a decentralized technology, so anything that happens on it is a function of the network as a whole. Some important implications stem from this. By creating a new way to verify transactions, aspects of traditional commerce may become unnecessary.

Today’s Internet has security problems that are familiar to everyone. However, by storing data across its network, the blockchain eliminates the risks that come with data held centrally. There are no centralized points of vulnerability that can be exploited. In addition, while we all currently rely on the “username/password” system to protect our identity and assets online, blockchain security methods use encryption technology.

I hope this little tutorial helps describe what blockchain is. In my next article, I’ll discuss the value of blockchain to the FP&A profession.

2018 will be a busy year with FP&A Roundtables in St. Louis, Charlotte, Atlanta, San Diego, Las Vegas, London, Boston, Minneapolis, DFW, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Jeddah, and many other locations around the world to support the global FP&A community.

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About Brian Kalish

Brian Kalish is founder and principal at Kalish Consulting. As a public speaker and writer addressing many of the most topical issues facing treasury and FP&A professionals today, he is passionately committed to building and connecting the global FP&A community. He hosts FP&A Roundtable meetings in North America, Europe, Asia, and South America.
Brian is former executive director of the global FP&A Practice at AFP. He has over 20 years experience in finance, FP&A, treasury, and investor relations. Before joining AFP, he held a number of treasury and finance positions with the FHLB, Washington Mutual/JP Morgan, NRUCFC, Fifth Third Bank, and Fannie Mae.
Brian attended Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA for his undergraduate studies and the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech for his graduate work. In 2014, Brian was awarded the Global Certified Corporate FP&A Professional designation.